Goodbye, Losing Your Grip

Odd, how our creations take on lives of their own. They become
surrogate children, our hopes and fears piled upon their backs. At
some point we let them go, and off into the world they totter.

We don't let them go all at once, though. At first, many threads
bind us to them. No matter how far they wander, we are connected. But
such threads weaken over time. Thinner and thinner they grow, and one
day we look up and years have passed. What once burned white-hot in
our mind has cooled, glimmering faintly, glimpsed rarely and then only
out of the corner of our eye.

These are not new observations. I do not claim to have found a
motherlode of originality which I will now mine for your
edification. But I have just now, quite unexpectedly, found myself
presiding over a personal wake for my game. And so I do what I have
often done before: turn to the solace of shaping emotion into
words.

Origins

Shall I speak of my earliest memory of the game? I am driving
between Arkadelphia and Little Rock in 1994. I have dreamed the night
before of being in a coma, my body lying still while I roamed through
my mind. Back passages had opened before me, leading to things I did
not realize about myself. As I pass the town of Malvern I think, this
might make a good game.

Shortly thereafter, Kevin Wilson announced his plans to start a
software company called Vertigo Software. It was going to publish
interactive fiction. He asked people to submit game ideas to him. I
did so, talking about a man in a coma, an experimental drug, and my
plan to have branches within the game. Once upon a time, the first
chapter was going to have one variation; the second, two; the third,
four; the fourth, eight. By the time Kevin saw my précis, I had
eight chapters. There were to be two branches in chapter four, two in
chapter five, and four in chapter six. Kevin was excited about the
idea. I began design work, planning the first chapter and painting the
rest of the game in broad strokes. Surely it wouldn't take that long
to write.

Vertigo Software never materialized, and off I went to graduate
school.

Details

In the source code of each of my games I include the date I began
programming. It marks the beginning of my journey and serves to push
me onwards. The source code to Losing Your Grip
reads:

Programming Begin: 23 Aug 96

Memory fades in patches; clear images become fog and mist. Parts of
the game evoke no memory for me. I read the text, peer at the code,
and it is as if it was written by a friend, someone whose writing
style I am familiar with. Or perhaps it was the result of automatic
writing, some force moving through me and not deigning to leave
memories behind. Other times I look at part of the code and I remember
what I had for dinner the night I wrote that section. The day I began
coding, I typed that line and walked away for a little while until I
felt calm enough to continue.

I had many notes, all written in an old blue spiral-bound
notebook. "WriteRight," it said on the front. Inside was information
on Terry Hastings, née Jack Freeman, who was undergoing
treatment at a clinic. I had drawn a floor map of the clinic. The
eight chapters I had told Kevin about had turned into five, one for
each finger. There were to be two branches in chapters two and four. I
had maps and notes for every section save the final one.

Time spent on writing those notes was time saved in creation during
coding. There is a balance to be reached between straitjacket planning
and free-form coding-creation. Remarkably, I found that fine line and
hewed to it while creating my game of balances and tension.

Pain, too, fades. There were times when I would stare at the
screen, wondering what in the hell I was doing. I have memories of
this, in the same way that I see photos of myself at play as a child
and hearing a faint echo of the actual events in my head. That is
someone else painfully wrestling with the code and writing, someone
who does not yet know how the game will end.

Call

At this late date I do not remember if I asked on
rec.arts.int-fiction for beta-testers. I suspect I did not; I was coy
about my game. I had to have Mike Kinyon testing the game. I'd
experienced his prowess at testing before and marvelled at the
results. He was, as I expected, the light which illuminated many
cracks in the edifice I had erected.

I had little idea how much an effect Magnus Olsson would have on
the final shape of the game. I spent one hot day in August of 1997
agonizing over the game's first chapter. Magnus had told me how little
sense the layout of the first fit's building made. Damn him, he was
right. He was right. I wielded my scalpel and made the changes. It was
like cutting into my own leg.

There was so much to do. I wanted a manual for the game, newspaper
clippings, the brochure from the drug company. Amazingly enough,
thanks to the design abilities of Misty, I got these things. My
shareware game would have feelies.

And a version of TADS for Windows. If I expected Windows users to
pay me for my game, I needed a version that was more than a DOS
console application. With the assistance of Andrew Plotkin I had
WinTADS working by August of 1997, and had devoured my Kinder-egg
payment from Neil Guy shortly thereafter.

Response

15 January, 1998. I would claim that that date will forever be
etched in my brain, but I had to resort to Google
Groups to verify it. 1998, yes, mid-January, sure, but the exact
day? Fog and patches.

You can only check a newsgroup for messages so often before you
outstrip the arrival rate of new articles. For a short span in
January, I could have told you when each batch of articles arrived at
Duke's newsfeed with twenty minutes of accuracy. My obsession was
eventually rewarded. Hint requests started to appear. People began
discussing the game and What It All Meant.

Head-kicking. Had I only known how popular it would be, I would
have made it much more central to the game. Even more of a surprise
were the occasional pieces of mail I would get asking how much of
Losing Your Grip was drawn from my life. Was your father
mean or abusive? Was your family life unhappy? Did your dad really
send someone to lock faeries in a cage?

Sorry, no. The hospital and school are real places viewed in a
funhouse mirror. Little else is my life reflected. The dedication to
the game reads

For my dad, who first taught me love of language.
May I someday write as well as you.

To my experienced eye, Losing Your Grip carries veins
of youthful exuberance deep in its strata. Here I experiment wildly
with putting parser disambiguation in the mouth of characters. There I
add a sack object, common in Inform games. Let the players name the
dog? Sure, that might be interesting. If you cannot decide whether
or not to let the player explicitly choose which branching path to
follow, then do both. I wanted to try everything I could think of,
design by see-what-sticks-to-the-wall.

This game was the first of mine to undergo serious public
scrutiny. None of my prior work had been so publically reviewed. I
worried about this: would I have a skin thick enough to deal with
comments? I soon learned an important lesson, here encapsulated in two
quotes.

Still, I think fit 1 is clearly the weakest part of the game...
--Dan
Shiovitz

Perhaps the most successful part of Grip is the first fit...
--Duncan Stevens

On the whole, people's reactions were all I could have hoped for. I
was most pleased with confusion sown by the forking path of chapter
two. The fork occurred without warning, leaving many players unaware
at first that there was an alternate path. People would ask for hints
on rec.games.int-fiction, citing details from one possible chapter
two. Others who had taken the other path would then reply, "I never
saw any of that. Are you sure you're talking about chapter two?" Store
up these little triumphs; you will need them in future days when your
experiments do not fare so well.

Even after the initial rush of hint requests and thematic
discussions, the game elicited occasional comments. Fifty-some-odd
registrations before I ran out of printed manuals. A heated discussion
about how I described some monitors, courtesy of Lucian P. Smith, Nick
Montfort, and the IF
Bookclub.

Everything has a shelf-life. Two years is not a bad lifetime for a
piece of interactive fiction. Tony Hutchins, wherever you are, thank
you for the final registration. March of 2000 seemed like a fine time
to close up shop. The supply of manuals was exhausted, as was I of the
game.

Beginning Again

In the bottom left of my desk is a drawer. It is deep, and holds a
number of my favorite commercial games. Plenty of space is left for a
blue notebook, along with printed copies of just about every post to
rec.games.int-fiction discussing Losing Your Grip.

For me, generating ideas is like siphoning gas from a car. Once the
flow begins I have trouble ending it, lest I choke. TADS 3 is coming
out soon. Ideas crowd, jostling for attention. The ruder ones are
yelling loudly. I will do what I have often done before: turn to the
enjoyment of shaping ideas into worlds.